Electrographic Architecture

Bridging histories of technology, media studies, and aesthetics, Electrographic Architecture forges a critical narrative of the ways in which illuminated light and color have played key roles in the formation of America's white imaginary. Carolyn L. Kane charts the rise of the country's urban advertisements, light empires, and neoclassical buildings in the early twentieth century; the midcentury construction of polychromatic electrographic spectacles; and their eclipse by informatically intense, invisible algorithms at the dawn of the new millennium. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and visual analysis, Electrographic Architecture shows how the development of America's electrographic surround runs parallel to a new paradigm of power, property, and possession.

Carolyn L. Kane is author of High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure and Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code.

Contents

List of Illustrations 

Introduction: White like No Other 

1. Synthetic White, 10,000 BC–1700 AD 
2. Edison’s White Light Empire, 1750–1881 
3. The “Great White Way,” 1880s–1910 
4. Douglas Leigh’s Times Square Spectaculars, 1930–1960 
5. The Young Electric Sign Company and Las Vegas Neon, 1920–1970 
6. Jenny Holzer’s Light Art as Urban Critique, 1970–1990 
Conclusion: Chromophobia in the Smart City, 1992–2022 

Acknowledgments 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index